I have always wanted to host my own Draw This In Your Style challenge and when I had reached over 200 followers I thought it would be fun to try one. For this I decided to do a self-portrait and to try a different style that involves more rendering than I normally do. I used a soft focus photo of myself as reference that I had taken during my A Level Photography course. This had been when my year group was isolating at home because of cases of COVID 19 rising, so we had to stay on top of photography coursework at home with limited supplies. I mostly used this image to get an impression of my features as well as for the pose of the hands. As I was drawing, I changed the position of the face a bit so it would look more symmetrical. To help me with the shading, I did a smaller pencil drawing in my sketchbook to help me and made notes at the top of the page to direct me on what I should do to improve my digital drawing. The theme of this illustration was focused on celestial imagery and stars. I took inspiration from sunrises for the colour palette because at the time one of my nicknames was sunrise.

Although I didn’t quite finish this piece, I’m happy with how it turned out considering I was trying a new rendering style inspired by old oil painters.